In an unusual move, federal health officials narrowed their recommendations for who should receive the vaccine against the respiratory syncytial virus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised last year that adults age 60 or older could receive a single lifetime dose of an R.S.V. vaccine, in consultation with their health care providers. On…
Last week, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, chair of the Senate health committee, called on a government watchdog to investigate why insurance companies are still charging women for birth control — a move that thrust access to contraceptives back into the spotlight. In a letter to the Government Accountability Office, the senator noted that insurance…
This article is part of our Pets special section on scientists’ growing interest in our animal companions. Over the last two decades, a flurry of scientific studies have demonstrated, over and over again, that dogs are social savants, highly attuned to human cues. But even as canine cognitive science flourished, few researchers bothered to probe…
Federal health officials warned that the risk of contracting dengue in the United States has increased this year, a worrying sign as global cases of the mosquito-borne disease hit record numbers. In the first half of this year, countries in the Americas reported twice as many cases as were reported in all of 2023, the…
Health officials in the Biden administration pressed an international group of medical experts to remove age limits for adolescent surgeries from guidelines for care of transgender minors, according to newly unsealed court documents. Age minimums, officials feared, could fuel growing political opposition to such treatments. Email excerpts from members of the World Professional Association for…
The U.S. surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, on Tuesday declared gun violence in America a public health crisis, recommending an array of preventive measures that he compared to past campaigns against smoking and traffic safety. The step follows years of calls by health officials to view firearm deaths through the lens of health rather than…
Amy Conroy sat alone in a veterinary exam room, hands clutching a water bottle, eyes blinking back tears. Her 16-year-old cat, Leisel, had been having trouble breathing. Now, she was waiting for an update. The door opened, and Laurie Maxwell came in. Ms. Maxwell works for MedVet, a 24-hour emergency veterinary hospital in Chicago. But…
Unlike most other supplements, fish oil has been rigorously studied, said Dr. JoAnn Manson, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. But the results of those studies have been mixed, leaving researchers and doctors still debating whether fish oil is beneficial for heart health. They have also revealed that taking fish oil is linked…
Pets are more popular than ever. Roughly two-thirds of American homes have at least one pet, up from 56 percent in 1988, according to the American Pet Products Association, and Americans spent $136.8 billion on their pets in 2022, up from $123.6 billion in 2021. An estimated 91 million households in Europe own at least…
It can take generic makers years to get ready to produce a drug, and they need to have a sense of the potential market in order to commit to investing in production. So, in the meantime, Gilead will aim to to ship “sufficient volumes” of lenacaprivir to low-income countries as soon as it has regulatory…
